Aljazeera reports that by Wednesday morning pro-Qaddafi forces had retaken Gharyan and Sabratha in the northwest, and had tried and failed to take the oil town of Brega in the east. Qaddafi’s jets also bombed arms depots in rebel-held Ajdabiya.
Pro-Qaddafi forces had secured the country’s Western border with Tunisia on Tuesday and then attacked the city of Zawiya, just to the west of the capital. Zawiya’s partisans, joined by defectors from the Libyan army, successfully defended the city. There is said also to have been an attack by Qaddafi’s forces on Misurata (Misrata) to Tripoli’s east.
In other words, Qaddafi still controls only parts of Tripoli, a bit of territory to the far west, and his birthplace of Sirte, and is not proving able to retake lost territory. As it stands, I still think he has lost 90% of the country. But until the Tripoli officer corps decides they cannot win and throw in with the rebels, or until the rebels manage to mount a credible military campaign to take the rest of Libya, it appears things have settled for the moment into a stalemate– though one that overwhelmingly favors the rebels with regard to people-power, despite Qaddafi’s continued military assets (a small military force that is well-equipped and relatively well-trained can sometime trump a big civilian population).
It increasingly appears that outside intervention via the UN or NATO is off the table, and so the end game will likely play out inside Libya and based on Libyan dynamics.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s major swing producer, is afraid of unrest itself and attempting to buy off its own population, so needs the extra money for this purpose. Saudi Arabia had traditionally attempted to hold prices down, because its vast reserves meant it could always make its money in the future, and its relatively small population (22 mn. citizens) left it with limitations on its economic absorptive capacity, i.e., it couldn’t put a lot of oil profits to work in its own domestic economy.
So the Saudi government is handing out $37 billion, all of a sudden, to its people for housing and unemployment relief.
Saudi authorities on Tuesday detained a Shiite clergyman in the Eastern Province who preached a sermon calling for a constitutional monarchy. Shiites are probably about 12 percent of Saudis and are culturally and politically repressed by the Wahhabi establishment, which typically views them as idolaters. Had the call for constitutional monarchy come from other quarters, it would be more significant, since it is hard to imagine Wahhabi-Shiite political unity. Unrest among Saudi Shiites might affect the oil-rich Eastern Province where they mostly reside, but the Saudi state has significant repressive capacities in that area.
So far, Iran and Iraq are the only Middle East countries to have seen significant protests this winter that have regular parliamentary elections. Significantly, Iran’s elections are now viewed as fraudulent by a plurality of Iranians. Protesters came out into the downtown area of Tehran on Tuesday, and were repressed, while opposition leaders Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi may have been taken off to prison (they were under house arrest).
The March 9, 2010 elections in Iraq produced no change from the previous government, and power inheres more in the oil-rich central executive than in parliament. There is a big protest planned next week on the anniversary of those elections, which is pretty scary– as Libyans and Egyptians demand parliamentary elections, Iraqi’s are protesting against theirs. Many Kurds outside the Kurdistan Alliance establishment, many Sunnis, and many Sadrist and other Shiites feel as though high political deals brokered behind closed doors determine their fate more than elections. Otherwise, most of the major protest movements have been against authoritarian regimes that had ceased making sure the people shared in national resources. Ironically, Iraq is dealing with its protests with a combination of violence and hand-outs, and so is behaving more like Saudi Arabia than like Tunisia and Egypt.
The Great Middle Eastern revolt of 2011 has not written its last line yet.
Kusha Sefat writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment:
In delineating the differences and similarities between the recent Egyptian uprising and the one that resulted from the disputed presidential election in Iran, Pouya Alimagham points to an interesting and important point. The Egyptian regime, while enjoying broad international support, fell in just 18 days. This contrasts the Iranian regime’s ability to systematically squash a grassroots uprising that at one point included three million protesters. Alimagham notes that Iran’s resilience in the face of mass protest deservers some consideration.
An equally important point is Iran’s attitude (and what enables this attitude to persist) in contrast to most other states in the region engulfed in mass demonstrations. Both Mubarak and Bin Ali immediately conceded by offering “reforms.” Fearing their own uprising, states like Jordan and Saudi Arabia conceded in advance, with the latter offering its citizens $36 billion in benefits. (Ghadaffi never backed down, but he may lose his life over it). Iran, on the other hand, is taking steps that sharply contrast the conciliatory attitudes of other regional states. Domestically, and in the midst of broad international sanctions, Iran is undertaking a significant and comprehensive economic reform plan which is likely to hurt and further anger the core of the opposition (middle class urbanites). Internationally, during the last round of talks in Istanbul, Iran added two preconditions for moving forward with the P5+1: suspension of sanctions and acknowledging Iran’s right to enrichment, effectively asking the West, in the words of Reza Marashi: “Now what are you going to do?” This is more than a case of resilience and defiance toward domestic opposition and the West. Rather, it raises questions on state capabilities. That is, in contrast to Egypt and Tunisia, what capabilities does the Iranian state have to withstand grassroots uprisings, and how were these capabilities gained?
As one veteran conservative Iranian diplomat put it, “we do not bow down to any power, unless that power is really powerful.” It seems that the US, together with European allies and domestic opposition can shake Iran, but are not powerful enough to break it. Yet, only thirty years ago the Shah of Iran, who similar to Mubarak and Bin Ali enjoyed broad international support, was ousted by domestic opposition alone. This points to a qualitative shift in Iran’s capabilities over the past 30 years facilitated by one primary factor that distinguishes it from all other states’ in the region and the former Pahlavi regime: the experience of revolutionary crisis. It is, as such, worth trying to understand Iran’s capabilities in a revolutionary context and in doing so, the appropriate comparison would be to others states with successful social revolutions, namely France, Russia, and China.
There has been much debate about revolutions, particularly since the beginning of the Egyptian protest. But rarely has this debate touched on what a successful revolution really looks like, what capabilities revolutionary states gain, and how. To look at Iran through the prism of revolutionary crisis, it is worth going back to Theda Skocpol’s seminal work on social revolutions. Skocpol illustrates some of the conditions that must exist for revolution to take place. These conditions existed in Iran prior to its revolution but no longer do, yet they continue to exist today in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc. Further, Skocpol illustrates the course that a revolutionary movement must take in order for that state to benefit from the fruits of revolution and gain strategic capability; otherwise what is left has more in common with coup d’état.
In comparing France, Russia, and China Skockpol identifies that both domestic and transnational conditions must exist for revolution to take place. While domestic and transnational conditions influence one another, if the particular state faced with domestic pressure is also at a disadvantage internationally (politically, militarily, and ideologically) then the conditions for revolutionary crises are in motion. Like Egypt and Tunisia today, France, Russia, China, and Iran were all at a transnational disadvantage prior to their uprisings. France’s competition with England exhausted its capacity to raise new loans and sent the economy into a severe recession and resulted in the bankruptcy of state’s financial institutions. Russia was entangled with a comparable, if not worse, vicious cycle of international competition. By 1915, the magnitude of Russian defeats in WWI had been acknowledged and the dominant strata of the Russian society lost confidence in the Tsar and his autocracy. China and Iran were both characterized by political dependency which as Skockpol points out is the most severe case of transnational disadvantage. While, through their revolutionary crisis, France, Russia, China, and Iran overcame their transnational disadvantages, Egypt and Tunisia are currently characterized by political dependency and are firmly under Washington’s strategic umbrella. This means that in addition to domestic pressure caused by the uneven spread of capital, the international conditions for revolution are also ripe in Egypt and Tunisia. The same is not true with respect to Iran.
How was Iran able to move up the transnational scale via its revolutionary crisis? Revolutions are not static, but are processes. An important factor in revolutionary crisis are external wars, which as Skocpol notes are central and constitutive. Revolutionary France ultimately lost the Napoleonic Wars. Nevertheless, mobilization for war and military interventions in the midst of the unstable internal realm of France created a centralized bureaucratic mechanism at the disposal of the state. The same is true with the Russian revolution and WWII, the Chinese revolution and the Sino-Japanese War, and the Iranian revolution during the Iran-Iraq war. In the case of the latter, the war was as much part of the revolutionary crises as the ousting of the Shah. In Iran, practically all internal opposition which resisted the dominant discourse of the war were wiped out, leading to a sense of stability in the face of an Iraqi incursion which confirmed the Islamic Republic as the true and undisputed legitimate authority of Iran. By the end of the war, a highly centralized, effective, and flexible government had prevailed. Internationally (militarily, politically, and ideologically) Iran started accumulating strategic capabilities, a process which excelled after the fall of Iraq and reached its apex during the Hezbollah-Israel war.
Pouya Alimagham writes in a guest column for Informed Comment
What the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions Tell Us about Iran
There has been much debate about whether the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, especially in the latter, will produce a system resembling that of the Islamic Republic in Iran, which was born of revolution in 1979. However, in focusing on what is indeed an important question, two crucial points have gone unnoticed: The speed with which these two revolutions have occurred tells us something about their Persian counterpart’s endurance as it relates to its own grassroots protest movement, and at the same time the revolutions challenge the Islamic Republic’s narrative on the discourse of revolution in the Middle East.
Remarkably, the Egyptian regime—for all its international and regional support, decades of institution-building and massive security apparatus—collapsed after facing only 18 days of an albeit concerted and relentless protest movement that would not settle for any compromise short of Mubarak’s ousting.
The Egyptian government’s inability to survive the protest movement contrasts with the Iranian government’s continued grip on power. After the June 12, 2009 presidential election, large segments of Iranian society morphed Mousavi’s election campaign into a popular protest movement that grew rapidly and reached nearly three million people in Tehran alone three days after the announcement of the results. The speed with which the protests mushroomed prompted Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to order a crackdown a week later. Through the use of mass coercion and the deployment of its own supporters, a sizeable number in themselves, the regime systematically regained control of the streets after months of intermitent protests. The efficacy with which the regime enforced its will on the protesters and its ability to call upon hundreds of thousands of its own supporters signify its ability to endure in the face of a protracted and explosive challenge to its authority.
That the relatively isolated Iranian government was able to weather such a prolonged storm, lasting eight months in all, while the powerful Egyptian regime, which enjoyed regional and international support, notably from the US, fell after only 18 days attests to the Iranian government’s endurance. This is an important point deserving consideration when calculating how to promote non-violent democratic change in Iran.
That is to say, marches and demonstrations alone will not be sufficient to enact peaceful regime change in Iran. As Iran’s opposition tries to rekindle its own protest movement by tapping into the momentum of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, the opposition’s strategy should not be limited to street activity, as it was in the past, but expanded into a more comprehensive approach including strikes, encampments in Iran’s own Liberation Square and, most importantly, garnering the support of Iran’s armed forces—all of which were tactics vital to success in Egypt.
Besides underscoring the Islamic Repubic’s ability to endure and highlighting the necessity for a broader strategy for non-violent action in Iran, the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions also provide an ideological challenge to the Iranian regime’s discourse on revolution. Specifically, these recent revolutions cast doubt on the regime’s narrative that Islamic Revolution is the only means by which to topple foreign-sponsored and deeply entrenched dictators in the region. Until now, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 has been the only populist-led revolution in the Middle East. The Egyptian Revolution of 1952 and the Iraqi Revolution of 1958 were not revolutions in the traditional sense, but military coups against hated monarchs that were immediately supported by the masses. As the sole country to orchestrate a popular revolution, the Iranian government has argued that revolution is possible in the Middle East only through the framework of Islamic Revivalism, positing its own history as a testament to this contention. Arguing that it was solely the people’s belief in Islam as an ideology that empowered the revolutionary movement to overcome the Shah’s western-backed regime, such a narrative of the Iranian Revolution marginalizes other forces and factors that contributed to the revolution’s emergence and success.
Although it remains uncertain which direction they will eventually take, simply by virtue of having emerged within a secular and nationalist framework, the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions’ current states of triumph provide an alternative to the Iranian government’s theory of revolution. By doing so, they have inadvertently detracted from the allure of Islamic Revolution, which the Iranian government has long championed. In other words, the Islamic Revolution can no longer claim the mantle of being the only path to popular revolution. This challenge to the Iranian government’s discourse on revolution explains why authorities in Iran, however unconvincingly, are attempting to depict the recent revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia as part of a wider Islamic Awakening.
Thus, in addition to the belabored discussions about the improbability of these revolutions charting a path similar to that of Iran’s in 1979, the two points related to the durability of the Iranian regime and the challenge posed to its narrative of revolution warrant attention because of the crucial insight they offer Iran observers. The speed with which the dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia fell stands in stark contrast to the Iranian government’s survival after the 2009 post-election turmoil – a critical point that needs to be considered when strategizing how to promote non-violent democratic change in Iran. Concurrently, these recent revolutions bring to the fore an alternative that challenges the Iranian government’s narrative on revolution, revealing that a revolution does not necessarily have to be an Islamist one in order to claim victory over a seemingly invincible authoritarian regime.
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Pouya Alimagham is a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan and a blogger at iPouya.
What is at stake for Americans in the Bahrain unrest?
1. Bahrain is a major center for the refining of crude petroleum, refining some 270,000 barrels a day. This amount is not large, but given tight petroleum supplies and a price of over $100 a barrel for Brent Crude, an outage there would certainly put up world prices.
2. Bahrain hosts a naval base for the US Fifth Fleet, important to the US security architecture for the Persian Gulf (the Arabs say Arabian Gulf). Nearly 2/3s of the world’s proven petroleum reserves and 45% of the world’s natural gas reserves are in the Gulf region.
3. Bahrain is an important finance center.
The Shiite majority is attempting to assert itself there. A Shiite-dominated government in Bahrain might well demand a closure of the US naval base. It would not be an Iranian puppet, insofar as Arab Shiites are jealous of their independence and most Bahraini Shiites don’t follow ayatollahs; but it would certainly have warm relations with Tehran. A Shiite victory there would politically embolden other Gulf Arab Shiites, in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (Shiites are a minority in all three). Insofar as Iran enjoys soft power with the region’s Shiites, the net result would certainly favor Iran and at least somewhat disadvantage the United States, which already shot itself in the foot by helping install a Shiite government in Baghdad that has excellent relations with Iran. For the Bahrain government to become more democratic and more Shiite-influenced would annoy the Wahhabi Saudi state, which now sees the Sunni Bahraini king as a strategic asset.
Gulf
Thousands of Shiite demonstrators came out yet again in Bahrain on Tuesday. They are demanding that prime minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa step down. An uncle of the king, Sheikh Khalifa has been appointed PM for four decades. The Shiite protesters want an elected prime minister who would reflect their demographic dominance.
The killings of two demonstrators, one on Monday and another on Tuesday, have helped to galvanize the crowds. In an unusual concession, the king, Hamad Al Khalifa, apologized Tuesday for the deaths and promised that the shooters would be brought to justice.
The demonstrators thronged into the downtown Pearl Roundabout, and some are insisting on spending the night there. The main Shiite political party, with 18 seats in the lower house of 40 seats, is Wifaq. It suspended its participation in parliament on Tuesday in protest against the killings of the two demonstrators.
Bahrain has a little over 1.2 million people, of whom 54 percent are expatriate guest workers, nearly half of them from India. I can remember, on the occasions I was in Manama, the way signs in Malayalam festooned the market and the money-changer stalls. The other 568,000 are Bahrainis. Of these, social scientists think about two-thirds, or about 374,000, are Shiites. In turn, about 100,000 of these are Ajamis, i.e. Shiites of Iranian heritage who are now Arabs. The rest are Baharna or indigenous Bahraini Shiites, who mainly adhere to the conservative Akhbari school that does not believe in following ayatollahs. Many of them live in rural villages outside the capital.
The other 187,000 or so are Sunni Bahrainis, the community to which King Hamad Al Khalifah belongs. He has reigned as king since 2002 (having come to power as emir in 1999).
Bahrain
In the Gulf, typically guest workers cannot vote and don’t have permanent residency or a path to citizenship, though it is rumored that the Sunni monarch, King Hamad Al Khalifa, has bestowed Bahraini citizenship on some expatriate Sunnis in a so far vain attempt offset the indigenous Shiite majority.
The Bahrain constitution lets the Sunni king appoint the 40 members of the upper house of parliament. The lower house also has 40 members, and in the 2010 election only 18 of them were captured by the Shiite religious party, Wifaq, led by cleric Ali Salman. The other 22 went to Sunnis of various stripes.
Ali Salman
So, in a country where citizens are probably two-thirds Shiite, Shiites have little representation in the senate and are a minority even in the elected lower house. Not only can the Sunni-dominated upper house veto measures passed by the lower house, but the king himself can veto legislation at will and can prorogue parliament whenever he likes.
Many Shiites in rural areas are poor, despite Bahrain’s riches, derived from its small petroleum industry, its vital finance sector, and strategic rent from the US for the US naval base for the Fifth Fleet. Wifaq not only seeks more equitable representation for the Shiite majority but also a better economic deal for the poor.
Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expressed support for Egyptian protesters. “Despite all the [West's] complicated and satanic designs … a new Middle East is emerging without the Zionist regime and U.S. interference, a place where the arrogant powers will have no place…” Yet on Monday, Iran reacted to its own street protests in a manner only the worst of the Egyptian secret police tried, on one or two days.
Thousands of Iranians demonstrated in the streets of Tehran on Monday, with a handful being wounded and at least one dead in the course of the regime’s crackdown. Protesters were attempting to revive the excitement and anti-government feeling of summer-fall 2009, when millions objected to the announced vote tallies that affirmed the victory of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Unlike in Egypt, where except for a day or two the Mubarak regime avoided direct physical confrontation of the demonstrators, in Iran the Basij, or volunteers for the Islamic Republic, attacked protesters on motorcycle and repressed them. Eyewitnesses said that dozens were jailed.
Meanwhile, protests also broke out in Bahrain, where Shiite activists are protesting their marginalization by a Sunni monarchy, even though Shiites form two-thirds of Bahrain’s population. The US Fifth Fleet is based at Bahrain in the Gulf.
In Egypt, which inspired the current round of demonstrations, the martial law government pledged to have the constitution amended within 10 days, with the changes put to a national referendum within 2 months. Demonstrators had demanded that clauses disadvantageous to free and fair elections be removed or changed before polls are held, sometime before October.
In Algeria, where there have also been small demonstrations, the government is now saying it will lift the emergency laws through which it has ruled with an iron fist.
Alarms have been raised by those observing the popular uprising in Egypt that, while it is not itself a Muslim fundamentalist movement, the Muslim fundamentalists could take it over as it unfolds. The best-positioned group to do so is the Muslim Brotherhood. Some are even conflating the peaceful Brotherhood with radical groups such as al-Qaeda. I showed in my recent book, Engaging the Muslim World, that the Muslim Brotherhood has since the 1970s opposed the radical movements. In any case, the analogy many of these alarmists are making, explicitly or implicitly, is to Iran in 1978-79, which saw similar scenes of massive crowds in the street, demanding the departure of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, their king.
Misagh Parsa argued that the revolution of 1978-79 was made by several different social groups, each for its own reasons. The revolution was fought against the monarchy, which presided over an oil-exporting economy that had gone into overdrive because of the big fourfold run-up of prices in the 1970s. Many felt that they were not sharing in that prosperity, or were inconvenienced by the Shah’s authoritarian government.
1. THE BAZAAR: The bazaar is a way of referring to the old business and artisan classes who congregated in covered bazaars and around mosques and courts in the older part of Iranian cities. Everyone from tinsmiths, to moneylenders, to carpet import-export merchants is encompassed by the phrase. The bazaar came to be in significant competition with the new business classes (importers of tin pans were putting the tinsmiths out of business, and modern banking was making inroads against the moneylenders). The bazaar had many links with the ayatollahs in mosques and seminaries, including via intermarriage. The Shah despised the bazaar as a bastion of feudal backwardness, and imposed onerous taxes and fines on it, in addition to casually destroying entire bazaars, as at Mashhad. THE BAZAAR FAVORED THE CLERGY AND BANKROLLED THE REVOLUTION.
2. WHITE AND BLUE COLLAR WORKERS: Industrial and oil workers struck over their wages and labor conditions. School teachers and white collar professionals (nurses, physicians, etc.) protested the lack of democracy.
3. SECULAR PARTIES: The old National Front of the early 1950s movement for oil nationalization was weak and aging but still significant. The Communist Party was much less important than in the 1950s but still had some organizational ability. Left-leaning youth radicals, such as the Fedayan-i Khalq (which leaned mildly Maoist) had begun guerrilla actions against the regime. There were also secular intellectuals in what was called the Writer’s Movement.
4. RELIGIOUS FORCES: The religious forces included not only the clergy and mosque networks of dissidents such as Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (in exile in Najaf, Iraq and then Paris), but also religious party-militias such as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK: Fighters for the People). In Shiite Islam, a doctrine had grown up that laypersons owe implicit obedience to the clergy when the latter rule on the practice of religious law. Ayatollahs have a place of honor not common for Sunni clergy.
Parsa argues, I think correctly, that the religious forces were initially only one of the important social groups that made the revolution, but of course they ultimately hijacked it and repressed the other three. Note that although the rural population was the majority in Iran at that time, it was little involved in the revolution, though it was very well represented in the subsequent revolutionary parliament and so benefited from new rounds of road, school and other building in the 1980 and 1990s.
Egypt is, unlike Iran, not primarily an oil state. Its sources of revenue are tourism, Suez Canal tolls, manufactured and agricultural exports, and strategic rent (the $1.5 bn. or so in aid from the US comes under this heading). Egypt depends on the rest of the world for grain imports. Were it to adopt a radical and defiant ideology like that of Iran, all its major sources of income would suddenly evaporate, and it might have trouble even just getting enough imported food. Moreover, the social forces making the revolution in Egypt have a significantly different profile and different dynamics than in Iran. Let us just go through the same list.
1. THE BAZAAR: To the extent that there is a bazaar (the Arabic would be suq) in Egypt, it is by now very heavily dependent on the tourist trade. Coptic Christians are well represented in it. The suq therefore tends to oppose social policies that would scare away Western tourists. The suq will do very badly this year because of the turmoil. One merchant in Khan al-Khalili once told me that the bad years for his business had been 1952, 1956, 1967, 1973– the years of the revolution and then the Arab-Israeli wars that would have been celebrated by nationalists but which he regretted.. Because few tourists came those years. That the Egyptian Market would bankroll Egyptian fundamentalists to establish an oppressive theocracy that would permanently scare away German holiday-makers is highly unlikely.
Khan al-Khalili
2. WHITE AND BLUE COLLAR WORKERS: These groups are among the primary instigators of the Egyptian uprising. The April 6 group of young labor activists first came to prominence when they supported strikes by textile factory workers in Mahalla al-Kubra and elsewhere for improved wages and work conditions. There have been more than 3,000 labor actions by Egyptian workers since 2004. The pro-labor youth activists have been among the major leaders of the uprising in the past week, and had pioneered the use of Facebook and Twitter for such purposes.
Egyptian Factory Workers
3. SECULAR FORCES. When I say ‘secular’ with regard to Egypt, I do not mean that these groups are made up of atheists and agnostics. Their members may go to mosque and pray and be personally pious. But such people can nevertheless vote for parties that are not primarily organized around religion. These include the New Wafd Party, a revival of the old liberal party that dominated Egypt 1922-1952 during its “liberal” period of parliamentary elections and prime ministers. The Wafd had originally represented the interests of great landlords and budding bankers and industrialists, though its original role in fighting for independence from Britain also gave it popular support. It reemerged when Egypt began turning away from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s socialism and it again championed private property rights. It attracted the allegiance of many Copts, as well as middle class Muslims. Although it has suffered divisions and declining popularity in recent elections, in a situation of free and fair elections it could regain some popularity. Then there is the Tomorrow (al-Ghad) party of Ayman Nur, who won 8% of the vote in the 2005 presidential election. And there is the Kefaya! (Enough!) movement. All three favor human rights and parliamentary democracy. There are also many secular figures in the literary establishment and in the film world (such as comic Adil Imam). And, of course, there is the ruling National Democratic Party, which has a generally secular bias and dislikes Muslim fundamentalism. Whether it can overcome its association with Hosni Mubarak and continue to contest elections credibly remains to be seen. It is now by far the dominant party in parliament, though nobody thinks the elections were free and fair.
Ayman Nur
4. THE RELIGIOUS FORCES: Unlike in Iran, there are relatively few prominent dissident clergy. “Televangelist” Yusuf al-Qaradawi, in exile in Qatar, should be counted among them. The Egyptian state had for the most part nationalized mosques and controlled the clerical corps. Few Egyptian clergyman command the respect or obedience of the laity to the extent that Khomeini did in Iran. The major religious party is the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928. Although it developed a terrorist wing in the 1940s, it faced severe crackdowns in the 1950s and 1960s, and lost that capacity. Although the radical thinker Sayyid Qutb came out of their movement, the MB leadership disowned him in the late 1960s and even refuted his radical doctrines (such as declaring other Muslims with whom he disagreed to be ‘non-Muslims’) as “un-Sunni.” By the 1970s the Brotherhood’s leaders were willing to make their peace with the government of Anwar El Sadat. He let them operate if they agreed not to resort to violence and not to try to overthrow the government. In the 1990s, the Brotherhood came to counter the radical movements, such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and so had a tacit partnership with the state. Egypt does not allow parties to be organized on the basis of religion, but even so Muslim Brother candidates have done well in some parliamentary elections (especially 2006), running under the rubric of other parties.
So to recapitulate. The white collar and labor activists are far more central to the organization of the Egyptian protests than had been their counterparts in the Iranian Revolution. The Egyptian “bazaar” is much less tied to the Muslim clergy than was the case in Iran, and far less likely to fund clerical politicians. Whereas Iran’s bazaar merchants often suffered from Western competition, Egypt’s bazaar depends centrally on Western tourism. Secular parties, if we count the NDP, have an organizational advantage over the religious ones, since they have been freer to meet and act under Mubarak. It is not clear that the law banning religious parties will be changed, in which case the Brotherhood would again be stuck with running its candidates under other rubrics. And, Sunni Muslims don’t have a doctrine of owing implicit obedience to their clergy, and the clergy are not as important in Sunni religious life as the Shiite Ayatollahs are in Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood, a largely lay organization, has a lot of support, but it is not clear that they could gain more than about a third of seats even if they were able to run in free elections.
One of the sources of the Muslim Brotherhood’s popularity was its opposition to Mubarak, and it may actually lose followers without him around. Other religious politicians and entrepreneurs may proliferate, in a freer atmosphere, dividing the religious section of the electorate. And, the Brotherhood could well evolve to be more like Turkey’s Justice and Development [AK] Party than like its old, sectarian, underground self. There is nothing in MB ideology that forbids participation in parliamentary democracy, even though it was not exactly a big theme of its founder, Hasan al-Banna.
Some analysts read off support for the MB from Egyptians’ religiosity. Egyptians have been undergoing a religious revival in the past couple of decades. You have to think about them like southern evangelicals in the US. When I am in Egypt it reminds me a lot of South Carolina in that regard. But that people go to mosque, or that their women wear headscarves, or that they value religion, does not necessarily translate into them voting for a sectarian and somewhat cliquish group like the Muslim Brotherhood. Many pious Muslims are factory workers and so closer to April 6 than to the Brotherhood. Many women who wear headscarves do so to legitimate their entry into the modern labor force and appearance in the public sphere. National identity co-exists with the religious. Egyptians are also great nationalists, and many insist that the Egyptian nation is a framework within which Christian Copts are completely legitimate participants.
A recent Pew poll found that 59% of Egyptians favor democracy in almost all situations. And fully 60 percent are very or somewhat worried about the specter of religious extremism in their society. About 61% do not even think there is a struggle between modernizers and religion in Egypt.
Among the 31% who did see such a struggle, 59% favored religious forces and 21% favored the modernizers. Barry Rubin and Michael Totten misread this latter statistic to be true of all Egyptians. They are wrong. The statistic is not about Egyptians in general, but about the third of them who see a conflict between modernizers and religion. 59% of 31% is 18% of the whole Egyptian population who favor fundamentalists over modernizers. The rest either favor the modernizers or think it is a phony conflict. Not thinking that modernism and religiosity conflict is generally a liberal point of view.
It cannot be assumed that the Muslim Brotherhood is the future face of Egypt, and there is no reason to think it has the popularity or levers of power that would allow it to make a coup. The Brothers are more likely to gain further influence (as they already have since 2006) via parliamentary elections. I cannot, of course, know whether there will be new parliamentary elections in Egypt soon, whether the Muslim Brotherhood will be allowed to run, or how well, exactly, they will do. They would likely be far more influential in a democratic Egypt than they have been under Mubarak, but I cannot see what would make them hegemonic. They would want liquor to be banned throughout the country, e.g. which would be very bad for tourism, and a lot of Egyptians depend on tourism. Of course, social groups sometimes do go in directions that irrationally harm their economic interests. But the Cassandras have no proof that Egyptians will take that path.
Jeremy Pressman writes in a guest column for Informed Comment
The Cyclical vs. the Fundamental in U.S. Policy: Suddenly both are in flux
If you run Washington, how best to maintain the flow of Persian Gulf energy supplies at a reasonable price, protect Israel, and – choose your era – block the Soviets or undermine al-Qaeda? While U.S. policy on the Gulf side of the Mideast has long been fluid and ever-changing, the Egyptian protests have suddenly challenged a different and seemingly fixed guideline: Washington can rely on pro-U.S. dictators and not push hard for democratic regimes.
U.S. Gulf policy has been in constant flux, moving between self-reliance and reliance on some combination of Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia: The two pillars in the 1970s (Iran and Saudi), the Rapid Deployment Force and U.S. CENTCOM, the tilt to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, Operation Desert Shield/Storm, dual containment, alliances with the Gulf Cooperation Council states, and regime change in Iraq culminating in the 2003 invasion. Of course such shifts were not random but rather often came about as a response to events like the Iranian revolution or the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
What is the right analogy for this aspect of U.S. Gulf policy? Maybe it is like a mountain climber on Mt. Everest. After each tough section, the climber reaches the next camp and rests. Sometimes there are moments of stability. But come morning, the climbing party will have to set out again. Nothing stays calm for long and it could all fall apart whether due to one’s own shortcomings or larger factors beyond one’s control (see Into Thin Air.
Yet in contrast, the U.S. approach across the entire Mideast has been straightforward and stable: being pro-American trumps being democratic. Insert Mubarak’s Egypt, the al-Saud dynasty, the Hashemites in Jordan or the like. Even George W. Bush, despite protestations to the contrary now by his acolytes], never pressed Saudi hard and let things slide with Egypt by the second half of term two. Bet on the stability of autocrats rather than the complexity of democracy. As time went on and the U.S. face (and aid) was so intimately tied to these regimes, the odds that democracy might unleash anti-American or, at a minimum, neutral politics increased.
Thus, what we have witnessed in the last decade has largely been unsettling and familiar until Tunisia and Egypt. The United States invaded Iraq with an insurgency supplanting rose petals. Iran sought to fill the power vacuum as it meddled in Iraq, pushed nuclear research, rhetorically attacked Israel, and continued siding with Hamas, Hizbollah, and other U.S. rivals. In short, U.S. Gulf policy was again in shambles with the U.S. ally (post-Saddam Iraq) in turmoil and the U.S. adversary (Ahmadienjad’s Iran) seemingly ascendant. Back to the drawing board – AGAIN! – on the Gulf.
But what Tunisia and Egypt have challenged is the enduring guideline of U.S. foreign policy, that while theoretically risky, endless short-term commitments to autocrats would never come unraveled. (A bet, by the way, that the United States has made many times in many countries around the world.) Suddenly, there is a hint of democracy, the possibility that Arab leaders and parties who express popular preferences will not only emerge but also create space between their foreign policies and U.S. foreign policy.
This hint of democracy is a double threat for Washington. It means dictators will not last forever, and it means democrats, should they follow, may not be reflexively pro-American (what should be an obvious point when they replace a pro-American, anti-democrat). I would agree that the general concern about the changing balance of power in the Gulf since 2003 and what that means for the region is important to consider. But I would also suggest it is part of the cyclical U.S. challenge of advancing its interests in the Persian Gulf. It has been decades of ups and downs. In contrast, Tunis and Cairo shake up the static part of U.S. policy in a fundamental fashion and challenge – or possibly force – Washington to engage in a fundamental rethink.
Jeremy Pressman
Alan R. Bennett Honors Professor
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Connecticut
Christopher Anzalone writes in a guest column for Informed Comment
Hezbollah’s Double Standards: Tunisia, Iran, & Popular Protest
Hezbollah just issued a statement via its media relations office expressing strong support for “the people’s uprising” (the Arabic term intifada is used) in Tunisia. This, only days after it and its allies withdrew their ministers from the Lebanese government of Prime Minister Saad Hariri leading to its collapse, The mass popular protests that led to the unexpected flight of Tunisia’s longtime autocratic president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali are heralded by Lebanon’s largest Shi’ite political party as “historic developments.” Hezbollah’s enthusiastic support and attempted cooption of the potentially groundbreaking events last week in the North African country stand in stark contrast to the party’s reserved, at best, public response to mass popular protests that followed the controversial Iranian presidential elections in the summer of 2009. While this discrepancy is hardly surprising it is a clear illustration of the Hezbollah leadership’s double standards as well as a fairly blatant example of their attempt to spin events in Tunisia to fit the party’s ideological framing.
The party’s statement says that it “cannot but express respect for the popular will [of the Tunisian people] that astonished the world its unity, solidarity, and quick reaction…Hezbollah believes it is the Tunisian people’s right to choose their representatives and elect who they find appropriate to rule their country.” The Tunisian protestor’s “self-reliance,” rather than “seeking foreign help,” is also praised. Comparisons are made to the Muhammad Reza Pahlavi’s and Ben Ali’s quick and unexpected flights from their home countries in the midst of mass popular protests against their despotism.
In contrast to the party’s excited endorsement of the popular protests in Tunisia, the public statements by Hezbollah’s two most senior leaders, its secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah and deputy secretary-general Naim Qassem, were muted following successive popular protests in Iran following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s contested reelection as the country’s president. In response to questions about the party’s position on events inside Iran, Qassem said “Hezbollah has nothing to do with Iran’s internal affairs. We don’t side with anyone. This is an internal Iranian issue. What is happening has nothing to do with our situation.” Nasrallah labeled the protests an “internal [Iranian] matter” that he would “not touch.”
Hezbollah’s quick public support of popular protests in Tunisia rests on the usefulness of the events of the last several days to the party’s platform and ideological framing. As its statement makes clear, the flight of Ben Ali, seen as backed by the U.S. and France, is a clear sign of the changing times in the Middle East and North Africa. The party “calls upon [Arab] leaders to learn from what has happened in Tunisia, and the first lesson is to end their relations with the arrogant countries.” Hezbollah’s silence when mass protests were routinely taking place in Iran was understandable given the fact that the party is closely aligned with the Iranian governing system headed by Ali Khamenei. Unlike the Tunisian protests Hezbollah had nothing clear to gain from taking a strong public position on the Iranian protests and certainly nothing from criticizing Khamenei or Ahmadinejad, both of whom have been great supporters of the Shi’ite party. However, Hezbollah has clearly shown that for all its claims to represent the “downtrodden and oppressed of the world,” its concern for political and social freedoms, like those of the nation-states it criticizes, is selective and determined by self-interest rather than a belief in universal justice.
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Christopher Anzalone is a doctoral student in the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University where he studies modern Muslim socio-political movements, Shi’ite Islam, and Islamist visual culture.
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